Sky & Telescope partnered with NASA to create this 12-inch topographic Moon globe, color-coded to highlight dramatic variations in lunar elevations. Impact basins and deep craters show up clearly in blue (the South Pole-Aitken Basin is particularly striking), whereas highpeaks and rugged terrain are colored white, red, and orange. This new globe has about 850 labeled features. Working with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) team to create the base maps, which show details as small as 0.5 kilometeracross. LOLA determines terrain altitudes by firing pulses of near-infrared light and then measuring the roundtrip travel time of the reflections; the accumulated data yield topographic maps.
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